SINK - Melt Book 2: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online

  Paul smiled, though it was a grim, thin affair with no enthusiasm. He wanted the guy to shut up.

  “Before I leave for work, I heard on the telewision a building had went down, but I don’t pay it much attention. I mean, this is Manhattan. Things are falling down all the time. If you know how these buildings went up, it is miracle any of them are standing.”

  Paul ached to talk to Petra. She’d know what to say to calm him. She wouldn’t be babbling on about nothing like this old guy.

  “I kiss my wife, she gives me lunch, I go to work just like any other day. Got my cart, went to my regular corner, but when I heard that explosion I was out of there.” He clapped his hands together, then slid one off high into the air as if a rocket were taking flight, then bent down to retrieve his mini-towel and covered himself again. “You never seen no one run so fast. I don’t care if my belly is jiggling so hard it knocks me in the face, I run. I know this sound. This KABOOM, CRASH, MORE CRASH, EVEN MORE CRASH sound. This sound is not good. This sound is sound of trouble coming for you. You hear this sound, you run.”

  Paul wasn’t listening. He was planning his next move. He would get out of the decon tent, find someone from K&P, and insist they kit him out with the most advanced flame-resistant gear they had. Those dudes supplied NASA with high-tech equipment. There was probably some extra-super-flame-retardant material no one had heard of that he could wrap around his entire body and be able to walk right into the middle of a supernova and make it out in time for dinner.

  “There was people running, falling, getting up, screaming. You know how it was. These people is going in the buildings, which I think is dumb as cheese on a cracker, because who knows what is going to fall down on your head next? We have a saying in Russia. Maybe you know it? It is ‘Pray for the bus and run like hell.’”

  Paul nodded. He hadn’t heard it, but he didn’t want to get drawn into a conversation. He wanted to keep on planning in his head.

  “It is like your Christians, they say ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ This is true. You ask, ‘Please God, do not let terrible thing happen today,’ but then when terrible thing happens, you do what you can so it is not happening to you. Da?”

  Who from K&P had been to the house? Could he remember any of their names? He hadn’t socialized much. Mom had asked that they be there but that was just to be polite, not because she expected him or Petra or Aggie or Midge to talk to her co-workers. But he would have been introduced.

  He closed his eyes, the better to remember. Fourth of July, that would have been the last time he saw anyone from her office. They’d had a barbeque. Michael Rayton had been there, of course. Paul tried to remember anything about him, other than he’d had four bratwurst and three burgers and had made a series of lame jokes in an attempt to impress Petra, but he was drawing a blank. He was a lab rat. No one special. Mom hadn’t said much of anything about him. Unlike her boss, Jake. She’d told them all to be extra careful what they said around him. She didn’t like him. Jake had been jolly and overly friendly and tried to tell them how much their mom yakked about them at work and how proud she was of them and all that rubbish adults say when they have no clue how to talk to teenagers. He and Petra had nodded and gotten away from him as soon as they could. He could hear what she was thinking. “Slime bucket to the maximillius. No wonder Mom doesn’t like him.”

  The line was barely moving. At least Fyodor had the good sense to shut up for a second. It gave him time to think. Who else had shown up? There was Mom’s assistant, Fran. She was cool. Not as standoffish as the rest of them. She made an effort to talk to him and Petra like a normal person, instead of standing in the corner with all the lab freaks, talking about work when they should have been enjoying the food. Mom and Dad had gone to a lot of trouble to put that barbeque together. The least they could do was try to pretend they were like regular people rather than working when they were off duty.

  The line moved forward. He was getting closer. Had to concentrate harder. Fyodor was talking to the guy in front of him, asking all the same questions he’d asked Paul. “Where were you at?” and “What did you see?” and “Where is your family now?” and “Your wife, she is safe?”

  Paul was transfixed by a spot of blood that had appeared on Fyodor’s shoulder.

  “The ones I think maybe are sensible are ones going into the subway.” Fyodor tapped the side of his head. “We call this lateral thinking. Come to problem from different angle. Don’t be run with the herd. Take yourself away from danger, fully.”

  “You’re bleeding,” said Paul.

  The blood blobbed up into a perfect circle, then slipped the confines of the hole and ran down his back.

  “No, I am careful,” said Fyodor. “I am covered all the way from here,” he touched the top of his bald head, “to here,” and bent to touch his toes.

  “Sorry, Fyodor,” said Paul, “but you’re bleeding.” He didn’t want to touch it. He backed up, pointing to the trail of bright, threatening red.

  The guy behind Paul saw the trail of telltale blood and backed up. Then the one behind him did the same. Soon enough, Fyodor was in a circle of people who were far enough away they couldn’t touch him, but not so far they couldn’t hear him.

  Fyodor twisted himself around, slapping his hand over his shoulder and wiping the blood from his back. “I am bleeding,” he screamed. “Now. Take me in there now. I seen what it does. Get me inside tent. I want it off. Get it out.”

  A medic was at his side, trying to talk him down, but there was no calming Fyodor. “Get it off, get it off, get it off.”

  “Come with me, sir.” The medic tried to get him to move towards the parked ambulances.

  “You have knife?” said Fyodor? His eyes were wild. Spit gathered at the corners of his mouth. “Cut it out. Now. You don’t do it? I do it.”

  “Next!” the line in front of Paul had evaporated. As Paul stepped into the showers, Fyodor dug his index finger into the wound on his shoulder and ripped off a strip of flesh.

  The curtain closed behind him and Paul was pummeled with razor-sharp jets of steaming water. They stung and itched and ran thin streams of grime out of his hair and down his body. He forced himself to keep his eyes open in spite of the burn, willing there to be no blood in the runoff.

  Chapter 6

  The sound of wood paneling cracking and splintering and peeling away from the wall made Aggie’s heart hurt. She flipped the hammer around so the claw was facing the wall and slipped it under the first nail. Taking the cabin apart, nail by nail, plank by plank, to get at the plastic in the walls was proving to be harder than she’d thought. This wasn’t just the family “getaway,” it was where she had most access to both her parents. Down in their regular house, a few miles outside of New Paltz, she didn’t get to see her mom that much. Alice was always working. She even stayed over in one of the company’s apartments when a project “neared completion.” Being at the cabin meant Aggie had her undivided attention. It was the only time her mom and her phone parted company.

  Petra and Sean were already onto their fourth beam. Petra didn’t seem to be having any trouble getting nails out. The two of them were chatting and laughing. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said they were flirting. Sean looked happier than he had since they’d landed.

  Aggie rested her hammer against the wood, willing all the plastic in their world away. If she could just leave the structure in place and get rid of the wires by magic, she’d be so, so, so freakishly happy, but her emotional history was woven into the woodwork, the paneling, the floorboards. She’d laughed and cried and made plans for her future, right here. She and Mom had stayed up long into the night talking about what she would do once she’d finished her Ph.D. Because she planned on doing things, things that would make her mom sit up and take notice; not in the way she did now, which was kind of, “Oh, that’s really great, honey, good job…” but in that way she got when she was talking about her team at work and all they had achieved. Then her f
ace shone, her voice was light and bright, she chattered away, filling them all in on the details she was allowed to share.

  Aggie knew what she was going to do with her life: she was going to be an oceanographer specializing in biodegradable pollutants. It was easily the most pressing problem the planet faced. If she could find a way to rid the seas of all waste, her mom would—without a doubt—be proud. She’d tell her friends about her. “My daughter, Dr. Aggie, she developed…” Aggie paused. What would be the best thing she could develop? What would make everyone wild about her? “Dr. Agatha Everlee, Nobel Prize Winner for Ecological Services to the Planet.” Was there even such a thing? She didn’t know. All she knew was she had to make her mother proud.

  She turned back to the wall. She had yet to remove a single piece of plastic, even though that was all Mom had asked them to do. She had to focus on that. She couldn’t be all spineless and ninnyish and nostalgic about what the place meant to her. It was just a place. The memories would still be there if they pulled it down to the foundation and set it on fire. She had to buck up and be an adult about this. She yanked her first nail from the beam. It left a long, uneven hole.

  “Try to pull it straight,” said Jo, “so we don’t damage the wood. We might be able to put it back together using these planks.”

  Aggie went to it, removing nail after nail; some of them came straight out, others required her to wiggle them about a bit, and then there were the really annoying ones that broke off and required needle-nose pliers to get the sticky-outy ends out.

  Four backbreaking hours later, the four of them—Aggie, Petra, Sean and Jo—had stripped the south wall of the cabin down to the studs and had pulled up a third of the cabin floor, revealing the wiring.

  Sean sat back on his haunches. “This is going to take forever.”

  Jo nodded, running her hand down the pipes that zig-zagged all over the place. “Some cowboys have been in here.”

  It wasn’t just the pipes that were a mess, the wiring was a serpentine nightmare.

  “Where do we start?” said Aggie. “We can’t just pull them out of the wall. We need to see where they go.” Aggie had expected neat rows of color-coded wires running in straight lines up the wall, held together with whatever magic electricians held wires together. But it looked like a living gorgon, its snakes rearing up and back, ready to strike.

  “Where’s the fuse box?” said Jo.

  Petra and Aggie both pointed at the north wall beside the kitchen.

  “We should have started there,” she said. “Start at the root and branch out.”

  Petra let out a huge, dramatic sigh. “This is mad. We don’t even know why we’re doing this.”

  Aggie looked away. She knew Petra would be the first to fold. She didn’t like physical labor. She was a paper-pusher. Not that there was anything wrong with paper-pushers. The world needed them. Apparently. But Aggie preferred to get her hands dirty. “Mom told us to do this,” she said. “We’re doing it.”

  “Couldn’t we have one more meal cooked on a real stove before we yank everything to pieces?” Petra looked at Aggie, then Jo.

  Jo shook her head. “Not my call. I’m a guest here.”

  “No,” said Aggie. “If we give up at the first hurdle, we’ll never get it done. We should just keep going.”

  “I need a break.” Petra put down her claw hammer and stepped beam over beam, careful not to look down through the exposed floor, into the kitchen below. “Look at this,” she said, opening the fridge door, “Refrigeration. Keeps food fresh for days. Imagine that.”

  “You’re not helping, Pet.”

  “You know why? Because I think this is mad. Look at that wall. Does that look like an easy task? We’ve just begun and it’s already impossible.”

  “Is that what you two were whispering about?” Aggie crossed her arms over her chest. She was ready to fight if that’s what it took to keep Petra on track. “Conspiring to halt the mission?”

  Sean backed up, stuttering.

  “Oh come on,” said Aggie. “I saw the two of you.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” said Petra. “You’re just jealous.”

  Aggie threw up her hands, eyes rolling to the back of her head. “Are you out of your mind? I am not jealous of your life, you’re…”

  A creak, a crack, splintering wood, and a howl so loud it would wake the dead, cut their argument short.

  Sean was thigh-deep in the exposed floorboards, writhing and screaming.

  “Get him out of there,” screamed Petra. She and Aggie raced to his side, grabbing an arm apiece.

  “No!” Jo dropped her tools. “Stay there, don’t move. We don’t want to make it worse.”

  It was hard to hear her over Sean’s screams. “It’s in my leg,” he yelled. “The wood is inside my leg.” He shuddered to a stop. Aggie wasn’t sure which was worse, the screaming or the silence. Little beads of sweat broke out over his upper lip. His eyes were wide and his mouth wider. The color drained from his face.

  Jo hunkered down so she was at eye level with him. “Listen to me, son. We’re going to get you out of there. I just want to make sure you’re not impaled on something that’s going to…”

  “Impaled?” Petra buried her face in her hands. “Don’t say impaled.”

  Sean wound himself back up, screaming about the pain.

  Jo dropped into the gap in the floor and walked gingerly between two beams towards Sean. “Hold on. I don’t want to fall through to the basement. Give me a minute. I’m almost there.”

  Sean’s screams had dropped to a steady moan, but he at least had his eyes on Jo.

  Jo bent down so she could see the damage to his leg. “Okay, so we have a vertical wound from the knee to the thigh.”

  “What does that mean?” said Petra.

  “It means we have to get him to the nearest hospital.”

  “Is he ‘impaled,’ like you said?”

  Jo reached out a tentative hand and inspected the wound site.

  “Get it out of me! Call an ambulance!” Sean pushed himself back away from the floorboard that was jammed into his leg, but that only made him scream louder.

  “Do not move.” Jo barked.

  Petra put a hand on Sean’s arm. “The ambulance will take too long. We’ll get you there. Don’t worry. We know all the short cuts.”

  “Pass me a hack saw,” said Jo.

  “You are not going to cut off my leg,” screamed Sean.

  “Don’t be an idiot, of course not. I’m going to save your leg.”

  Aggie handed her a saw and watched as she carefully positioned its ragged teeth about a foot away from his thigh.

  “This is going to hurt.”

  Petra was on the ground, his face in her hands. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. I didn’t mean to be. You know that, right?”

  Sean’s eyes were open wide, the whites showing. He bit his lip so hard Aggie was worried he was going to draw blood. Jo drew back the saw and took one push. Sean screamed so violently he almost brought the house down around their ears.

  “Do you have any painkillers?” Jo looked to Aggie for help. Petra was no use, she was sobbing on Sean’s shoulder.

  Aggie nodded and took off for the med kit. Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner? She wasn’t gone more than a minute, but by the time she got back Sean was so pale she was worried he was going to pass out.

  Jo dug through their emergency meds kit. “I’m impressed. This is a seriously good supply.” She looked up at Sean. His eyes had started to droop. “Right, we’re going to numb him out. We’re losing time. Petra, get down in here with me and hold this wood still. Do you hear me? Absolutely still.”

  “I love you.” Sean was woozy, altered, drunk on pain.

  “Shut up, you idiot,” said Petra, “of course you do.”

  “The wood splintered in just the right way…”

  “What?” Petra was ready to argue.

  “It’s pressing on his femoral artery. Do you know what that is
?”

  Petra nodded, scared into silence.

  “You understand why I need to keep him completely still?” Jo was calm and calming. Aggie was glad she was in charge. If this had fallen to her, she’d have yanked him out of the hole in the floor and he’d have bled out and she would have killed him. “Answer me. Do you understand why you need to keep the wood that has pierced his leg completely still?”

  Petra was shaking, but she managed a squeak. “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?” Midge was standing in the archway between the kitchen and the front room.

  Aggie rushed to her little sister’s side. “Where did you come from, Midgie? You don’t need to see this.”